Thecus N5200BR NAS Server

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Each drive bay opens by pulling the silver lever and prying to the left. This is a smooth, easy motion that moves the bay forward as the lever swings out. Once unlatched, the bay comes out easily, after which, a drive can be quickly mounted, securing it using four mounting holes on the underside of the drive and the provided screws. This holds the drive firmly in place and ensures proper alignment before inserting into the Thecus N5200BR NAS Server.

When we rotate the system to view the backend, numerous other connections are revealed. At the upper right is an eSata port which supports additional external hard drive expansion while two additional USB ports are offered for connecting supported hardware. Below the eSata/USB cluster is another USB port that allows the Thecus N5200BR to be connected directly to a computer to be accessed as a USB device. This does require some pre-planning, such as the allocation of space during the RAID creation process to specifically be used for USB storage. Ideally, it would be better if this space could be a folder, which would offer more flexibility in space allocation. We should also note that in testing, the USB connection was extremely slow on multiple systems and often paused for long periods during the filecopy process, leaving us to ultimately abandon timed file copy testing when connected to a system via USB. While it's an interesting feature, there is no logical reason to use it as it performs significantly slower than even 100mbps Ethernet.

Further down are four LAN ports which function as a switch, all rated at 1000mbps. There is also a WAN port which would connect to the network, which gives the flexibility of creating a separate sub-network, or the system can be set to share the same IP across all five ports for a passive switched setup.